


In Which Ino and Deidara are Siblings

by Tozette



Category: Naruto
Genre: Civil Servants Give Zero Fucks About Your Ninja Bullshit, Domestic Ninjas, Gen, Minor Character Death, Prompt Fic, Sibling Relationship, Slice of Life, akatsuki shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-05
Updated: 2019-02-05
Packaged: 2019-10-22 17:32:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 16,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17666996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tozette/pseuds/Tozette
Summary: Ino loses her remaining family, and in an effort to keep herself out of Konoha's child welfare system, she consents to being placed in the care of her closest remaining relative.[Please note that this fic is a collection of short pieces set in the one universe, mostly domestic and silly. It has a premise but not an actual plot.]





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> ### Please read this note
> 
> It will minimise confusion. This fic is something I'm separating out from my 'In Which Ino is Deidara's Recently Orphaned Half-Sibling' entries, which currently live in the giant [Naruto Prompts and Ficlets](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3977020/chapters/8924647) fic.
> 
> At the time of writing this post, **Chapter five** is the one that will be new to you, if you've previously been keeping up with the Ino & Deidara content in that 'Naruto Prompts and Ficlets' fic collection. 
> 
> If you're looking for the longer explanation, there's a note at the end of Chapter one that will explain the strange adventures of a confused Toz in trying to organise their fics.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter one was prompted by phoenixyfriend, who wanted something where 'Kakuzu tries to teach Deidara how budgeting works'.

"You'd be taking over as her primary carer," said the cool and professional voice on the phone. "The rest of her immediate family is dead."

"...Yeeaah," drawled Deidara slowly. "But is it really okay to ask an internationally wanted criminal to take her in, I mean - _hey_! Dan _na_! Give that back!"

"How did you get this number?" Sasori demanded. Which, yes, okay, maybe Deidara should have been worried about that too... but seriously, what kind of social worker tried to palm a kid off onto him? Even he knew that was a terrible idea!

Scowling fiercely, Deidara leaned closer. When he was close enough that his hair was mingling with the reddish edges of Sasori's, the tinny voice from the speaker was loud and clear.

"-able to divulge those details without sufficient identity related information except to Deidara-san. However, the Konoha department of child welfare has avenues of information available through the rest of the bureaucracy, including the tax office. Now-"

Deidara rolled his eyes and took the phone back from Sasori with some effort. Sasori gave it up after a moment's struggle, but he countered by putting it on speaker.

"-can commit her to care as necessary." Deidara snorted. He had grown up in an orphanage, and, look, yeah: it was shitty. But he turned out fine, and he didn't see why anybody else should get it any easier than he had, so really- "but the Hokage has decreed that we must contact any living family that isn't actually institutionalised."

"What," said Sasori flatly.

Deidara was a little inclined to agree with him, which was how he knew it was dire. "Even if they're S-ranked criminals from outside the village?"

He shared a glance with him, and they were both thinking variations on: _That would not have happened in Suna_ and _Iwa would never._

"Honestly, Deidara-san," said the caller, sounding briefly but intensely exhausted, "the Hokage makes a great many strange, questionable or clearly unethical decisions about the village's orphans here. At this point I'm just doing my job and hoping for the best."

"...Yeah," said Deidara slowly, which was probably not the response he should have had to what was doubtless vile sedition inside the village's walls. "...Sooo, does the Hokage have final authority over the orphanages themselves, or-?"

"Of course," said the voice, sounding a wee bit strained.

He shot another look at Sasori, whose expression was completely blank. There were, you know, orphanages. And then there were _orphanages_. The mouth in his left hand licked its lips nervously.

"No," said Sasori. The tone of his voice was a warning, although his face still didn't change.

The person on the phone went on as though Sasori wasn't clearly audible. "So, Deidara-san, if you're amenable to a brief interview and to proving your financial state is equal to caring for a second person-

"Deidara, _no_ ," Sasori repeated, pitch rising.

"-we'd be delighted to give you full guardianship of your half-sister."

"I'll do it, yeah," breathed Deidara, heart pounding.

" _Brat_ -!"

"Lovely," said the caller. "Our office is open nine to five. There's an outpost in the capital, near the public gardens. Drop in any time this month and I'll make room for you in my schedule."

There was a click and a dial tone.

"You're telling Leader," grated Sasori from between his teeth.

...which was about when Deidara realised he'd just agreed to _parent a child._

Panic ensued.

* * *

Pein was surprisingly good about it, actually. "She'll have no contact with her village again," he said with his pale eyes boring into Deidara's.

"No problem, yeah. All her family's dead, it's not like she's got much to go back for."

"Poor girl," mused Konan, although not as though she pitied her. Instead she looked at Deidara as though she was seeing right through him. A moment later, she glanced out into the rain and her stare remained locked there.

Annnd Konan continued to be hella creepy. Deidara inched away from her. He reminded himself once again that it was all okay because paper burned really well.

Then after a pause: "Kakuzu isn't likely to increase your pay," added Pein.

"... _shit_ ," said Deidara.

* * *

Yamanaka Ino was twelve, the illegitimate a product of the war with Konoha, and she looked a hell of a lot like him.

"Wow," he muttered, eyeing the photograph he'd been given. "We could be -" he was about to say _related_ , but then he would probably have to have smacked himself. "Huh."

"I know, right? She'll be a knockout when she's older," said the officer of the department, sitting down across from him.

Deidara eyed the man uncertainly. He wasn't the best at social stuff, but he wasn't, like, _Danna_. He was pretty sure that wasn't the sort of comment a thirty-something year old should be making. He'd have felt weird saying it, and he was only eight or so years older than her. "She's _twelve_ ," he pointed out.

The officer looked up at him, made a delighted expression, and noted something on a piece of paper.

Okaaay...? Deidara actively chose not to read whatever the hell that was.

"I can tell we're going to have a good interview already, Deidara-san," he said cheerfully. "Now, let's talk about your criminal history. I can see mercenary acts of terrorism and violence, but none of those are any different to the missions sanctioned by Iwa..."

Considering the missions sanctioned by Iwa - and considering the missions sanctioned by _Konoha,_ which were just as bad - that wasn't really a ringing endorsement. Deidara knew it, but the officer seemed to have developed some kind of selective stupidity.

Or non-selective stupidity. Deidara didn't spend a lot of time around civilians.

"Your criminal history appears to be limited to large-scale property damage and mass murder," the officer went on.

"Pretty much my skill set, yeah."

"Excellent, excellent. There's no history of non-consensual biological experiments, non-consensual psychological experiments, longterm imprisonment, sexual violence -"

The list went on.

And _on_.

A lot of the list seemed ...strangely specific.

Although interestingly Deidara _did_ learn that sex with an intelligent, consenting summon was still considered a crime in Fire Country, but only if it was a reptile.

_Huh._

In the end, Deidara was approved to become the carer of a twelve year old girl without delay. Even after he'd told them that his hobbies involved blowing things up and watching in a kind of trembling, heart-pounding excitement and elation so intense it almost made him dizzy.

"Excellent! It's good to be enthusiastic about your work," the officer had said cheerfully.

"Danna," he wailed into his phone ten minutes later, flying high above the capital on a clay bird, "their child welfare department is _terrible_."

"It's windy. I can't hear you," said Sasori, "and also I don't care. Why are you calling me?" And then he hung up, leaving Deidara squawking indignantly five hundred meters in the air.

* * *

Kakuzu didn't even make the effort to acknowledge him when Deidara appeared in his doorway. 'Not likely' Pein had said. Well. That had been something of an understatement.

"No," he said. The room behind him was dark, although Deidara could see the disturbingly serene silhouette of Hidan praying against a window. It was overcast outside. It pretty much always was, here.

"You don't even know what I was going to ask!"

"No," he repeated. He'd never even looked up from his book. It wasn't their accounts for once - it was a dated bingo book, which he seemed to be comparing with a newer release, subjecting both to an intensely critical eye.

"I'm not asking for money." Deidara'd already given that one up as a lost cause. There was the kind of 'no' that could be coaxed into a 'yes' and then there was the kind of 'no' Kakuzu made when he was talking about precious, precious funds.

And since Deidara wasn't stupid, he was willing to offer that concession right from the outset just to pique Kakuzu's interest enough to get his attention. Negotiation with Kakuzu was ...delicate. At best. Sometimes he just lost his temper and murdered someone.

"I just need somebody to show me how to plan a budget, yeah," he added sourly.

 _That_ made Kakuzu look up.

He squinted. "...really."

Deidara crossed his arms, scowling. He didn't need to look so disbelieving! Deidara could be responsible. ...sometimes. Well, not about himself, but he was an adult, that wasn't anyone's business but his!

But he was plenty responsible when Danna asked him to be, for example. Well. Mostly.

Either way, the child welfare people were insane and he wanted to make sure he wasn't going to, like, let the kid starve or something.

More squinting.

"She's a genin?"

Deidara nodded.

Then Kakuzu made a disgusted noise. " _Sit_ ," he commanded.

Deidara sat.

"Where do you get money coming in?" he barked.

"What?" Then: "Oh. You?"

Kakuzu twitched, but leaned forward to write 'AKATSUKI' in his sharp, old-fashioned script. The number he wrote next to it was not one with which Deidara was actually familiar, but it was probably around the same amount Kakuzu showed up with every month.

"...Would you even notice if I didn't pay you?" Kakuzu asked, twenty minutes later.

"Yes," said Deidara quickly, because he wasn't stupid enough to say otherwise. But he wasn't actually that sure.

There was a tick developing in Kakuzu's cheek. It was partially covered by his mask, but it was definitely there.

The intent in the air was rising, too, enough that Deidara was tensing every time Kakuzu moved his hands and Hidan, despite his relentless droning prayer, was obviously getting restless.

They kept going. Deidara was actually learning, which was unexpected. Kakuzu wanted a running account of all of his outgoing expenses, which Deidara thought was pretty unlikely to happen ever, but he was...

"You spend more than you get paid," Kakuzu said shortly.

"How does that work?" Deidara wondered.

"It doesn't, idiot. Do you have a line of credit anywhere?"

"A what?"

"Credit card? Source of income other than stated?"

That vein in his forehead could _not_ have been good for Kakuzu's health.

"No?"

"I need your tax invoices and the transaction history from your bank."

"...and, um, where would I get those?"

Deidara supposed he shouldn't have been that surprised when Kakuzu flipped the table and stormed out, but Hidan's laughter was really unnecessary.

Of course, Kakuzu's temper was uncertain at best, and he stormed back in about ten seconds later.

This time he grabbed Deidara by the hair. "Come with me," he hissed in a low and terrible voice.

* * *

By the time he made it back to his own room – shared grudgingly with Sasori – he was seriously bruised. Battered. Lightly singed. More sick of listening to Hidan laugh like a broken hinge than he'd even thought possible.

Kakuzu had been too close to really get any distance from, too.

It wasn't that Deidara _minded_ setting himself on fire, but he really would have liked for there to be an alternative option. Taking away the choice factor made it significantly less exciting.

"Danna," he whined.

"Mm."

"I'm not really a short distance fighter."

"Mm."

Sasori looked up at where Deidara was sprawled across the bed. He had the nascent urge to reach down and shove the edge of his shirt down lower where it was riding up over his belly, but Sasori was never really interested in Deidara's naked skin - except when he occasionally discussed what a nice puppet he'd make.

But that was perfectly normal and not perverted or creepy or anything, so Deidara didn't worry too much.

"Idiot. You knew this would happen."

"Money is _really_ boring, yeah," he said defensively.

Sasori grunted again.

"I could poison him," he offered after a moment's silence.

Deidara looked away and didn't let the smile overcome him. The warm fuzzies in his gut had nothing to do with the heat from his bruises.

He sighed instead. "No. I just need to talk to my bank."

"Mm."

As soon as he figured out which one _was_ his bank.

* * *

Deidara woke to an itemised list titled How Not To Be A Terrible Older Brother pinned to his door.

It was scattered with suggestions like ' _make time for her instead of putting her off_ ' and _'try not to kill anybody she's fond of_ '.

Perplexed, he crumpled it up and threw it away and commenced putting his hair up.

Then after a second he put his hair brush back down, pulled it out of the trash and peered at it again.

_Teach her things when she asks._

Okay...

Deidara hesitated, then left it on a table to be forgotten about instead.

...Weird.

* * *

Sasori refused point-blank to come to meet his new charge with him. He did not want to wait for the bureaucracy to organise themselves.

Deidara did not understand Sasori's impatience, because it was always so selective: he'd plot and settle to wait like an ambush predator half the time, and then the other half would see him lashing Hiruko's tail and spitting insults as his ire rose by the second.

So he asked, Sasori said no, he asked again and Sasori said no again, and so he asked again - although this time he was mostly just stirring shit and they both knew it. Sasori ignored him at the time but somehow found the patience to wait _hours_ for revenge, at which point he poisoned his breakfast.

This really only proved Deidara's point about Sasori's patience. He sure had time for some things.

Deidara was heartily sick, however, having ingested the spores from some obscure emetic mushroom.

"Really?" sighed Kisame, peering at his own food. " _Really_?"

The overcast sky lit the kitchen through a skylight, and the rest was all sturdy benches and utilitarian seats. They didn't cook often, so when somebody did cook it usually attracted the others like flies to shit. (Provided it wasn't Itachi's cooking, which attracted precisely nobody.)

"It's not in the food. It's on the spoon," said Itachi, completely unconcerned. His eyes flickered red and spun, bright and alien.

Deidara flipped him the finger. He was too busy throwing up on his own boots to shriek at him like he deserved. Asshole.

"Yeah, I think I'll eat something else anyway," Kisame sighed, and got up in a ripple of oversized muscle and terrible grace to go throw his breakfast away.

Itachi watched him for a moment, but in the end he ignored the commotion and picked delicately at his own rice.

When he was done vomiting he looked back at Sasori with bright, fevered eyes and contemplated stuffing Hiruko's mouth with C4. Deidara could think of five or six ways to do it, and Sasori would probably survive it.

And even if he didn't, Deidara couldn't help but think of all that potential and energy, all the beautiful essence of him, burnt up in one glorious moment. Mmm.

He licked his lips, tasted bile, and decided against it. It was a fine thing to balance, but there were other things.

Still, from the way Sasori edged around him and calmly but meticulously checked his things, he'd probably seen the thought on Deidara's face.

* * *

In the end, nobody came with Deidara. He supposed that was for the best, because Itachi was the bogeyman of the girl's own village, Kisame was a mountainous brute of a man, and everybody else was either too creepy for words or actually insane.

Sasori had really been the best choice of all of them, temper aside.

Although Deidara could allow that he spent a lot of time filling out paperwork in that office and Sasori probably would have snapped and stabbed someone.

As it was, Deidara alone - short, blond, androgynously pretty with no obvious weapons - seemed to terrify the pants off her.

Which just meant that at least she wasn't an idiot. (Of course she wasn't an idiot. She was his half-sister. _Duh._ )

In this case that wasn't necessarily a good thing in the short term, though, because it meant that when she was escorted into the office, Yamanaka Ino took one look at his forehead protector and went white.

"There's been a mistake," she said frantically, reaching out to snatch the elbow of the person who'd led her in. She seemed torn between shoving the civilian behind her or using him as a meat shield and fleeing.

The officer of the department of child welfare seemed totally inured to this sort of behaviour. "No mistake," he disagreed, removing his arm from her grip.

"He's a _missing nin_ ," she hissed quietly, as though Deidara might be offended by the comment, or perhaps as though he wasn't aware and she was trying not to break the bad news to him prematurely. He stifled a snort.

"Yes. But he's your half-brother," said the officer, shuffling a surprisingly thick pile of papers. "By decree of the Hokage, your familial relationship trumps politics in this situation, Ino-chan. Now please sit down."

Ino crept into the office and perched tensely on the edge of her chair. Her eyes strayed only briefly from Deidara and when they did it was mostly to check out her surroundings. He could see her picking exits, skimming obstacles. Obviously not much of a fighter, then; at least she knew it.

She was... skinny. Skinnier than he was, skinnier than Konan or Itachi, and that was saying something. Her face was pretty, but he skin was dehydrated and there was a darkness and a tension around her eyes.

He kind of wondered what she was seeing when she looked at him, because he hadn't gone out of his way to be intimidating or anything.

"So, this is Deidara-san. You'll be going home with him today-"

"Yo," he said, and flashed her a bright smile. "Shitty situation you've found yourself in, yeah. Let's hope we'll get on."

She looked at Deidara like he was a death sentence. The expression rolled off him. He'd seen it plenty of times before. "Please take care of me," she said flatly, by rote.

Still. He kind of wondered how she was going to deal with his housemates. He was really not the scariest thing in that building, yeah.

...not to _look_ at, anyway.

Well, they could burn that bridge down when they got there.

He looked at this too-skinny girl with her delicate looks and careful assessment of her surroundings and wondered for the first time if she liked blowing things up.

He hoped so.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, a little context for this fic: Previously, I had just been adding new scenes from this universe to my collection of Naruto ficlets and putting a numeral at the end to indicate where in the chronology the piece was. I have discontinued this practice. The reason is as follows: 
> 
> Once upon a time, a callow and (more) youthful Toz thought: _Oh! I have seen people use drabble collections for fics that seem much too short and insignificant to post as their own entries, and I have a lot of those. Perhaps I, too, shall make a drabble collection!_
> 
> Unfortunately, that same Toz, older and marginally wiser (on this topic, anyway), realised that they actually really dislike trying to find things in the tags they want when their search brings up many ficlet and/or drabble collections that are only peripherally relevant to the content they seek.
> 
> And so then they thought: _Well! I should probably stop doing that myself, then, since it's exactly the sort of thing that really annoys me,_ and then they made the :| face, because this sounded like a convoluted mistake to unmake.
> 
> This fic in particular turned out to be kind of sticky to organise, because I kept writing scenes that I wanted to slot in between other scenes, and... well, they're chapters in chronological order now, but that's why there's six chapters and only #5 (at time of writing) will be new to you if you've already read them. I certainly created a headache for myself by trying to keep them all in an ever expanding collection of ficlets! -_-; 
> 
> So here's this fic, which looks like a chapter fic, but which is actually just a collection of scenes from a universe. I don't expect it to develop a plot.


	2. Chapter 2

When Ino was little, her father had clutched her hard, breathed in the scent of her hair and told her if anything ever happened to him and her mother, anything bad, that she was to fight tooth and nail against being put in an orphanage.

“She has other family,” her mother had pointed out, in a dry tone that suggested Inoichi was being paranoid, even for a ninja. Even for him.

He’d looked grimly upon her, at her yellow hair that wasn’t quite the right shade, at the curves of her face, the shape of her mouth. “They might surprise you,” he’d said.

And her mother had gone quiet, icily cold, flat and empty behind the eyes.

That made a lot of sense in hindsight – now that Ino knew her dad wasn’t her father, now that she knew that her mother had been pregnant during the tail end of the third war, those bitter skirmishes that never seemed to cool, the ones that even now seemed imminent when shinobi met in the line of duty.

At the time, Ino had been small, loved to a fault by both her carers, and frankly bewildered.

“Ino?” Inoichi had prompted severely.

“Not the orphanages,” she’d parroted, uncertain why it was important but sure that it was.

They’d never brought it up again, but she remembered.

And now that distant somewhen had arrived, and Ino had been escorted from her village and to a tiny office in the capital. The whole place was clean, dressed in grey and off-white, with bright overhead lights and uncomfortably overstuffed furniture. It was unassuming, no charm or character – but that just made what was waiting for her there more alarming by contrast.

When her case worker had told her that her remaining blood relative was from outside the village and she’d have to meet them in the capital, she’d assumed a civilian. Not…

Ino’s half brother was a missing nin.

A missing nin originating from _Iwagakure_ , of all places.

That was…

That was actually pretty terrifying.

Her eyes zeroed in on his defaced forehead protector and didn’t want to leave.

She could see why they hadn’t been more specific. If somebody had actually told her that the relative who’d agreed to take her in was a criminal from Rock, she’d never have shown up.

And now that she was sitting in this sterile office, perched tensely on the edge of her chair with her hair on end, she could sense his chakra – he had a lot of it, even though it was locked tightly down. He might have had as much as Asuma-sensei, although that might be Ino’s alarm talking.

“Please take care of me,” she said mechanically in response to his introduction.

Deidara – introduced a little condescendingly as ‘big brother’ by the case worker, who seemed completely immune to the narrowed eyes and curled lip he was receiving in response – did not look like a missing nin. Ino had never encountered very many, but she had a distinct idea of what a missing nin should be.

There was a stereotype. Deidara, short and pale and surprisingly pretty with his carefully groomed hair and neat, wiry muscle, didn’t fit it at all.

So Ino found herself watching him while they sat in the office. She catalogued exit points and obstacles, unable to stop herself out of sheer nerves, but in the end her eyes always drifted back to him, compelled by paranoia and curiosity alike – Deidara wasn’t that relaxed, either, no matter what his carefully contrived body language suggested.

Ino picked out details almost without thinking: a ring with a teal stone and a character painted on it. He paid it no attention and must have been used to its weight on his hand. And he’d painted his nails black at some point. The polish wasn’t chipped or uneven, either, so it was a recent novelty or a habit. He was groomed, fit, smiling. He looked a lot like her, and not just because of his hair and colouring. He had her mouth, her chin, he raised his eyebrows in the same way.

He’d fit in back in Konoha, and that seemed… wrong. It set Ino’s nerves on edge a lot more than if he’d struck the expected notes of  
shadowy criminality.

“If you want to go into the orphanage, I’m not going to stop you,” he said directly – right in front of the case worker, who looked scandalised.

Ino looked at him. She looked at the case worker.

She knew, although perhaps these two did not, that anyone who ended up “in care” in Konoha ran the risk of disappearing. They came back, but… When they returned they weren’t the same. Cold. Colder.

It wasn’t acknowledged much, even more rarely aloud. But Ino was observant, and she had Inoichi’s bizarre and cryptic warning – she knew. And, look, usually it was younger people than Ino who went away… but the risk was still very, very real. 

She wondered what Asuma-sensei would say. Probably that a Konoha orphanage was better than an Iwa missing nin, no matter what shady possibilities awaited there.

Her eyes stung to think of Inoichi now, but…

She knew enough to know she didn’t want to be there.

Ino swallowed. “ _No_ ,” she said, after only a terrible second’s hesitation. At least this missing nin was a blood relation – Ino knew all about establishing points of familiarity with a captor, but she didn’t know what the hell went on in Konoha’s quiet, bloodless orphanages.

Deidara’s eyebrows rose. His mouth did a thing, the same twist that hers did when she was unpleasantly surprised. It was… strange. Compelling.

He gave her a second and then shrugged, blond hair falling loosely over one shoulder. “Sure, okay.”

She was careful to ensure that the spike of queasy relief in her belly didn’t show on her face.

The case worker relaxed. “Right,” he said, clearing his throat, “so, Ino-chan, did you have any questions for your big brother?”

Yes. Millions. So many that she almost stalled just thinking about them. And then she really did stall because, well. “…Are there many you’ll answer?”

He hesitated. His visible eye drifted pointedly toward the case worker. Ino wrinkled her nose but nodded, and that whole silent exchange flew right past the case worker, who was scribbling on his notes.

Deidara waved a hand, and Ino blinked at a glimpse of something that didn’t look quite right there – but it was only visible for a split second, and she wasn’t sure what she’d seen. Something white buried in his palm. “I’m from Hidden Rock,” he said, tapping his forehead protector wryly, and she looked back at his face, feeling unaccountably guilty. His lips quirked. “I’m nineteen, and I’m an artist–”

“An artist? Deidara-san, we have on file that you’re a demolitions specialist,” interrupted the case worker, frowning.

_Demolitions expert_ , Ino processed internally. In Konoha that meant huge fires or massively destructive lightning techniques, but fire natures were rarer elsewhere – maybe for Deidara that meant large scale earth techniques, destabilising foundations, making landslides and collapsing buildings? There were a lot of earth-natured ninja in Earth country.

“I am,” said Deidara in a voice that had gone warm with the edges of defensive anger. “There’s lots of overlap, yeah.” He paused, clenched his jaw, clicked his teeth.

The case worker looked dubious.

“Civilians wouldn’t get it, yeah,” sniffed Deidara.

Ino mistrusted the sudden tension in him.

He _had_ seemed too well-adjusted for an Iwa-nin. But there was something mean and hungry peeking out behind his pretty blue eyes and Ino found that – not _comforting_. She’d be stupid to find it comforting. But the knowing was important. It was a relief to find something he had strong feelings about.

She licked her lips.

“I like growing flowers,” she said, making him turn to peer at her. “Well. Growing lots of things, really. But there’s a lot of overlap there, too - more than people think.”

His expression warmed a little – or at least the actual hostility drained away. “Aa… poisons, yeah?”

…also medicine, inks, paper and coded messages or a kind gift at a hospital bedside, but everybody did tend to think of poisons first.

She nodded, though, because: well, yeah. Poisons. That was the big one.

Deidara opened his mouth to say something but then seemed to think better of it.

They watched each other in very awkward silence. Somewhere an analogue clock was ticking. 

The case worker cleared his throat. “Ah, well, maybe you could talk a little about where you’re going to live?” he suggested.

Ino couldn’t quell her annoyed look in his direction. If even the hidden villages were hidden, missing nin sure weren’t going to advertise their homes. _As if!_

She decided to ask the inevitable question before the awkwardness set in, and even as Deidara opened his mouth to speak, she asked: “Did you know my father?”

Deidara seemed compelled to show willing somehow, though, and at the same time he was already saying, “lt’s not nearby. I cleared out a room - or, well, supervised clearing out the room – f…”

And he stopped. His expression evinced such a complete lack of change that it had to be fake.

There was a pause.

“I knew him, yeah,” he said finally. “He died when I was seven. You didn’t really miss much.”

“Oh,” said Ino. She hoped fervently that, if she ever had kids, none of them ever looked a stranger in the eye and described her absence as ’ _not missing much_ ’.

An unfortunate possibility occurred to Ino then. “You’re a missing nin, right? So, um, am I going to be able to see people?” Ino wondered. “Friends,” she clarified.

Deidara tilted his head. “…probably not.” He looked at her uncertainly. “You could send letters, if they don’t have anything about some stuff in them. Or supervised visits, if we’re careful.”

Ino clenched her jaw. That was… better than she’d expected, but worse than she’d hoped. She’d miss – well, she didn’t talk to Sakura all that much these days, and rarely about anything but Sasuke. And he didn’t talk to her. She’d miss Chouji, though, for all his dull wits and obsession with food. She’d even miss Shikamaru’s whining.

Mostly, though, she’d miss her parents. And they weren’t coming back no matter where she went.

She nodded. “That’s… yeah, okay.”

Deidara made a relieved face. She supposed that could have ended up being harder on both of them.

“Well,” said the case worker, too brightly. “You seem to be getting along just fine, and your time’s up, so, Ino-chan, Deidara-san–”

And here he stood, trying to encourage them to do the same so they could leave his soulless little office.

Ino stood, chewing her bottom lip. “I had an escort here,” she said finally, “a friend’s dad. And they’re probably waiting. Can you take your forehead protector off when we leave?”

“I’m in the bingo book,” Deidara cautioned her.

“Really?” Ino glanced at him, trying to figure out if she’d seen his image before. All the familiar features were ones she’d seen in her face, so it was hard to say.

But then people only really memorised the A and S ranked warnings and bounties, so…

“Hey, hey! Are you saying you don’t think I’m scary?” he asked, shoving his forehead protector in his weapons pouch and ignoring the case worker looking pointedly at the clock.

Ino hesitated. Anyone else she’d have teased, but she didn’t know him well enough, and the truth was that Deidara was scary. When she was close she could feel his chakra, big and restless, and she knew enough to know that surviving a defection from one of the big five wasn’t easy.

“You don’t look scary,” she said, even as she hesitated to exit in front of him because it would mean putting him in her blind spot.

“But I see you’re prepared to be wrong, yeah,” he said cheerfully, sweeping right past her and through the door without a moment’s pause. 

She followed him out just in time to see the expression of dawning recognition on Shikaku’s face. And looking at his sleepy eyes narrow, his lax posture shift and stiffen… Yeah. She was prepared to be _very_ wrong.

“This is _so_ troublesome,” murmured Shikaku, discarding his cigarette with a flick of his fingers. “Hokage-sama didn’t intend his decree to apply to _Akatsuki_ ,” he complained to the civilian receptionist.

“Who?” Ino asked, blinking.

“If you can cite part of the decree we’ll enforce it, Nara-san,” the receptionist said with a strained smile that spoke of many repetitions. She was looking at him like she thought he was kind of slow. “Unfortunately the Konoha branch of the office of Child Welfare is beholden to the letter of Hokage-sama’s decrees, not their spirit.”

Shikaku heaved a huge, smoky sigh.

“If Hokage-sama’s decrees made any damn sense I wouldn’t have agreed to this in the first place, yeah,” muttered Deidara. He turned away from Shikaku and the reception desk and raised his voice so Ino could hear easily. “Are you coming, or–?”

“We’ll need to set up visits,” Shikaku said, cutting Deidara off. He pushed off from the wall he was leaning against and his shoes made soft, ominous taps on the floor. The shadows swelled and rippled around his feet.

Ino was, somehow, between the two of them - she’d landed there when Deidara had stepped away from the confrontation. She froze, feeling like a mouse before a cobra: motionless, fascinated, terrified.

“No,” said Deidara. Just like that: a hard, flat _no_.

Ino started because he’d literally just said that they could do that. She frowned and looked over at him. “Deidara?”

His expression was one of pure spite.

“Maa,” sighed Shikaku. “You just don’t like being told what to do.”

…which, given the dull flush that rose over Deidara’s face, was _completely accurate._

“Is it really okay if you give a kid to another kid to look after?”

Deidara sputtered. “Maybe you should ask your Hokage that, yeah!”

Shikaku made an annoyed noise like he was contemplating the Herculean effort of doing precisely that. “Nevertheless. We’ll need more than proof of life. Monthly visits are–”

“Ne,” said Ino quietly, ignoring him in favour of inching close enough to be heard by Deidara. “You _did_ say.”

“I know I did,” hissed Deidara, “but now if I do try to organise that it’ll feel like I’m doing it because he said so!”

Ino snorted a small, surprised laugh before she could stop herself. 

Shikaku had stopped talking, and was now watching them curiously. Ino wasn’t sure if he could see what they were saying – he could see her mouth, but Deidara had angled himself away.

“Is that really so awful?” Ino asked.

“Only if Danna finds out,” muttered Deidara. Then he sniffed. “Quarterly, on neutral ground,” he said more loudly.

Ino shifted on her toes. Quarterly. That was three months, twelve or thirteen weeks… It felt like a long time. She licked her lips.

“Quarterly,” Shikaku said, eyeing her carefully. Then: “Wind Country.”

Deidara scoffed. “One of your allies. Hardly neutral.” Then he cocked his head. “Fine, Wind Country – but not with you.”

“Mmm? Who, then?”

“I don’t care. But not you. Konohagakure’s jounin commander can’t come crawling out to Wind for this every three months.”

“I’m flattered,” drawled Shikaku. “That’s fine, though. It’s a troublesome thing to do anyway. You’ll have to limit your numbers, too. Maybe–”

“Ah, shinobi-tachi,” interrupted the receptionist, jangling her keys pointedly, “our office does close for lunch. I’m afraid you’ll have to take this outside.”

“Just as soon as he lets me go, yeah,” said Deidara, looking pointedly toward his shadow

Ino followed his gaze. She hadn’t even had an inkling.

“Just insurance,” said Shikaku, without moving. “Considering.”

Ino glanced more critically between them. Considering what?

Deidara’s smile was narrow and very sharp. “That’s very fair,” he said sweetly. “ _You_ can let go first.”

A pale little leg hooked over Shikaku’s shoulder, and then a smooth clay body was hauled up after it. The little spider sculpture was perfectly articulated and actually very cute.

Ino had no idea what it was doing there or when Deidara had placed it.

“Of the two of us,” said Shikaku, “I’m not the one who’s a known traitor. So we can probably take my word on it, don’t you think?”

“Eh-hem,” said the receptionist. She shook her keys again. “Today, gentlemen, if you don’t mind.”

Deidara pursed his lips. “Let’s call it a show of good faith, yeah,” he said after a second, and the spider crawled off Shikaku’s shoulder and dropped to the floor with a soft, meaty thump.

The spider crawled away and the shadows looping around Deidara’s feet slackened. Deidara took Ino’s elbow just long enough to pull her back with him when he moved out of range.

Then he stopped.

He looked back at Shikaku and clicked his tongue.

There were still shadows trailing away from Shikaku, but now they were no longer tiny thin strings - they swelled as the bulk of the shadows were drawn away from Deidara.

There was a lot more than one clay spider at the end of those.

“So you did notice,” mused Deidara happily.

Shikaku shrugged. “If I let them get much closer, I might get caught in the detonation.”

“Gen-tel- _men_ ,” said the receptionist despairingly. “Workplace health and safety regulations require me to take no less than half an hour every six hours. You must leave the building before I can lock up, and I’m three minutes away from being in violation of those regulations. It is time to leave.”

Civilians had the weirdest rules. That, and they actually knew no fear. Ino shook her head incredulously.

Deidara looked between the receptionist and Shikaku. “Mm. I’m ready to go, yeah.”

He looked at Ino.

She swallowed, shot Shikaku one more uncertain look, and followed Deidara out.

“Finally,” muttered the case worker to the receptionist behind them.

“Do you think I can get hazard pay for this?” The receptionist wondered.

“No,” said the case worker ruefully, “but if you need counselling it’s tax deductible.”

“ _Ooh_ ,” murmured the receptionist.


	3. Chapter 3

The streets were calm and quiet in the capital. It was mostly a civilian city with a few exceptions. The Fire Daimyo's guard was one. Ino had also seen samurai in the streets occasionally, mostly from Iron -- mercenaries passing through, or just tired ronin travelling from place to place. Mostly, though, it was civilian, and that meant that people paid very little attention to them -- without his forehead protector, nobody even seemed to notice Deidara, and the Leaf emblems Ino and Shikaku wore were by far the most common in this part of the world. 

One or two people shot them a curious look, but most were busy -- office workers taking their state mandated breaks, loud children tightly controlled by parents' clinging hands, shoppers and petitioners and, distantly, a nobleman in a palanquin who attracted far more interest than they did. 

Outwardly, Deidara looked like he was completely ignoring Shikaku. Ino doubted that was true but you couldn't prove it by her. He drew her away from the door of the case workers' tiny office and pulled a tiny sculpture from one pouch. He set it gently on the ground, then stepped back. 

"Now would be a good time to say goodbye," Deidara suggested. "But if you really do want to come with me, I don't recommend getting in reach of his shadow, yeah. I'm not built for the hostage stuff."

_Demolitions_ , Ino remembered. She looked sideways at him. 

Deidara raised his eyebrows. Smiled guilelessly. She bit her lip. Was she really…?

She thought of orphanages, of her father’s advice, of children coming back different. Yeah, she was.

Her proper goodbyes had, in theory, already been conducted at the village gates before dawn - a tentative and surprising peace between her and Sakura, blooming only now under the threat of Ino's absence; an awkward 'well, see you,' with Shikamaru, who had said a lot more by getting up that early to see her off than he actually has with his words; and crushing hugs for both Chouji and Asuma, who she thought she'd miss the most. Hinata-san had appeared, briefly and surprisingly, and shyly gifted Ino a new diary. There was a pressed peony between the pages, a quiet message: _be brave_. Ino hadn't thought they were close, but it was nonetheless a touching gift. 

Ino hesitated, then turned and bowed a little toward Shikaku. "Thank you for coming with me and helping," she said. 

Shikaku just looked tired. "Anytime, Ino-chan." Then he raised one hand toward Deidara. "Three months."

"Sure, sure," Deidara said, waving this off, and made a gesture at the little sculpture, which expanded with a soft _pop!_ and a shift of chakra.

"This is our ride," he told her. 

Ino eyed the bird. It was definitely big enough to ride on -- it was big enough that it would have brushed the ceiling inside a building, and much broader than a person. But...

It was a bird. 

With wings. 

She was thinking that if he'd wanted something that moved all nice and stable across the ground, Deidara probably could have made a bigger version of one of those little spiders. 

"It's fine," he told her, peering at her face like he was trying to tell why she was hesitating. "Seriously. It's not going to blow up or anything, yeah."

Ino wasn't scared of heights. She had grown up scrambling through the topmost branches of Konoha's huge trees and she'd been to the top of the Hokage Monument heaps of times. She didn't get a sense of dizzying horror looking down, and most of the time she didn't even think of the possibilities of a fall. She'd never been on anything that literally flew before, though. And there was nothing comforting about the oddly specific assurance that it 'wasn't going to blow up', either. 

Carefully, she stepped on, climbing the oddly ramp-like tail. It felt like clay under her feet, damp and malleable and worryingly slippery. 

"Your chakra won't be able to stick to it," Deidaea said cheerfully, darting up and casually slinging one arm around her middle to hold her on. He had to be close to do it, close enough that their hair mingled in shades of blond and she could smell the iron and chemical residue on him. They weren't bad smells, necessarily, but very... ninja. They were very ninja smells, and not familiar ones. Ino could hardly help how she tensed up. 

Then, beneath them, the bird began to move. Its broad wings spread and unbent, casting a huge shadow upon the ground. They flapped once, experimentally, and kicked up a little cloud of dust on the road.

"Oh," said Ino, and she clutched reflexively at the arm around her. She really _couldn't_ stick with her chakra, although that didn't stop her frantically trying. Something about the clay repelled it. And they were definitely about to take flight. 

"Bye, Nara-san!" Deidara called over his shoulder. He gave a jaunty wave, which was not returned. 

This time the wings gave an almighty thrust. Dust and dirt billowed and obscured half the street, and then there was a flicker of wind chakra at the edges of her senses. The bird launched into the air, taking them with it. 

The pressure of their sudden ascent was enough that Ino almost lost her footing. The air tore at her hair and clothing and whipped past her ears. 

Ino couldn't quite suppress a yelp. She clung to Deidara with shaking, white-knuckled hands. The actual sound of his laughter was lost to the roar of the air but she could feel the movement of it in his chest where they were pressed together. Below, the ground dropped away, away, away, until the city was a grey blemish on the landscape and the trees were just a slightly fuzzy-looking patch of darker green. She could see the roads running like veins below. 

She'd never been scared of heights in her life but she'd also never been this high up before. Her head felt like it was spinning. Any second now she was going to topple and plummet to the ground. 

Deidara was still laughing. 

"It's not funny!" Ino yelled to be heard over the roar of the wind as they gained altitude. She smacked his forearm because it was easy to reach. 

He dipped his head toward hers. "It is kind of funny," he assured her right into her ear. "A little."

She contemplated stomping on his instep but there was a good chance he was channeling chakra to his feet to keep them attached. Ino didn't fancy being tossed from the bird. 

"Come on, Ino-san, I've got you. I won't let you fall. I've never let someone fall, yeah! Well," there was a thoughtful pause, "not by accident." 

Ino wished he'd stop trying to comfort her with these doubtless honest but very specific assurances. 

The flight was mostly silent because it was a strain to raise their voices that high over the wind. There was nothing particularly skeevy-feeling about the way Deidara was hanging on to her, at least. Ino had had enough men put "friendly" hands on her lower back or around her waist to trust her guts on that one. Although it was kind of awkward to have a relative stranger holding onto her the whole way, she considered it way less awkward than falling to her death.

There was one thing, though. 

Ino was pretty confident that Shikaku-san would have some intention of tracking her back to wherever Deidara was taking them, even just as a precaution. But it was also true that Shikaku had not expected Deidara -- and most tracking methods would be useless against a flying enemy. Inuzuka dogs would never find the scent and the byakugan was only useful at a certain distance, which, well, Ino was pretty sure they were at least that far _up,_ never mind the distance over ground. A kikai would be the better bet - the beetles could sense each other from absurd distances and a single one required such minuscule amounts of chakra to survive that most ninja wouldn't even notice them. But the Aburame were not as numerous as the other clans and the chances of one being present in the capital and capable of leaving a tracker on her during the time period were not good. 

On the other hand, Ino didn't know Shikaku that well but she did know Shikamaru. Planning for all possible eventualities was kind of the Nara thing. 

She unclenched one hand from Deidara's arm where it was hooked around her waist, then dug her fingers into her hair. Her hair was the easiest and most obvious place, so of course she didn't find the tiny female kikaichuu until she got to the wrappings around her waist. 

"Ugh." Ino held the tiny dark thing between her fingers. Its little legs kicked at the air in a panic. 

She didn't know what she'd expected. 

"You're bugged," said Deidara down into her ear, sounding oddly delighted. 

She raised her voice to a dull bellow to be heard. "Yeah... Shikaku-san had to have organised this before we left." Because what was the point of bringing an Aburame all the way to the capital for a meeting with what was very likely to be a civilian? Shikaku had not had any way of knowing for sure that Ino's mysterious relation would be a missing-nin, and missions had to be paid for. 

"No," said Deidara, "you're _bugged_. With a _bug_. It's a pun."

"A...aa," agreed Ino slowly, eyeing him sideways. 

It was in fact a very common pun in Konoha, particularly among the Intel field agents who most often did tracking and reconnaissance. It was so common, in fact, that it was almost on par with the ritual 'I'm here to relieve you,' and 'I'm so relieved!' shared between bored chuunin on gate duty. 

Deidara, on the other hand, had obviously never considered it before. He held it in for a few more moments, but then her complete lack of response seemed to just make it all the more amusing to him and he snorted inelegantly. "Come on, that's great."

It had delighted Ino the first time she'd heard it, too. At four. 

Ino regarded the bug for a second and then flicked it over the clay bird's wing. It quickly disappeared in the wind, presumably not to be heard from again. 

It might have been stupid, in a way, given that the bug she'd just killed was probably her only solid chance for getting back to her home village. But she'd made this decision herself, and she wasn't going to endear herself to Deidara by bringing trackers into his house. 

The huge clay bird ate the miles, moving swiftly and taking an unobstructed straight line across the sky. A journey that would have taken Ino days on foot took only hours by this method, although it had its downsides. Her face hurt from the biting wind, and as soon as they passed into an area where it was raining her clothes were plastered to her. 

Rain at this altitude, with no real shelter, was basically like taking a shower fully clothed. Water was in her eyes and mouth, running down the collar of her clothes, slicking everything to her. It turned the wind icy.

When they finally slowed and began to lose altitude it was in the middle of nowhere in a location that Ino assumed was over the River boarder -- it wasn't barren enough below to be Wind, but it seemed too far to still be in Fire. 

It would have been slightly chilly without the water, but after the biting wind up in the air and now soaking wet, it was freezing. Her teeth were chattering.

"There's no point trying to wait it out," sighed Deidara, glancing up at the dark sky. The clay bird shrunk again with a pop of displaced air. "It's basically always like this, yeah."

He bent to collect the much smaller sculpture and tucked it away.

It was only an hour or so at an easy walk, but between stress and bring soaked to the bone Ino found it exhausting. By the time they actually got to the base, she felt like she’d been awake for days.

The base was on the outskirts of a village. This far into River, all the villages had a derelict and industrial feel: cracked windows, chipped concrete, civilians who paid more attention than usual. The building Deidara came home to was grey, squat and ugly with narrow windows and a distinctly foreboding air.

It was also big. Ino had been under the impression that Deidara lived with someone – a “Danna”, who would make fun of him somehow – but this place was much too big for three people. She recalled belatedly that Shikaku had referred to a whole group, an ‘Akatsuki’.

She glanced at Deidara, who, far from being relieved to be home, seemed to be working himself up to something. “It’s big,” she pointed out. “Are there a lot of people here?”

“What? Oh… yeah. Ten. Eleven now,” he added, smiling down at her.

Ino paused. Ten people? Ten… she looked back at Deidara. Ten people, and she thought it unlikely they’d be civilians.

Ino was exhausted but she still had plenty of energy to be nervous.

As they came closer, a shape emerged from the entryway: broad and squat and sort of hunched. As they approached more details became clear, until Ino was quite certain that the body under that dark cloak was not human shaped. It was just hunched up all wrong, roach-backed, more like a reptile or an insect than a person. Ino swallowed nervously.

"Ah, Danna," said Deidara, and his shoulders relaxed.

This was--? Ino looked back at the cloaked shape. Was this really okay..? She licked her lips. This person looked a lot more like the intimidating sort of character she'd expect from a missing-nin. 

Deidara was still talking. "I'll bet he's grumpy. That jounin commamnder slowed us down... Don't worry, his bark is worse than his bite. Although if he _actually_ bites you, you should..." There was a pause. "Um," said Deidara. "Well, he won't bite you, don't worry. Yeah."

"You're late," growled a voice that seemed to emerge from somewhere deep in the belly of the... person. Creature. Person. Ino inched closer to Deidara.

"Ino-chan had an escort," said Deidara. "And then we ran into the storm. It couldn't be helped."

"Excuses. You could have predicted any of those things."

Deidara sighed. "I didn’t keep you waiting on purpose. Anyway, this is Ino-chan -- Ino-chan, this is Sasori. He's--"

“Sick of waiting on a brat who doesn't have the sense to come in out of the rain,” Sasori interrupted waspishly, turning from them to head inside. From what Ino could see of the shape beneath his dark cloak, there was something trailing under it. It might have been a bag or a weapon... or it might have been a long, segmented tail. Whatever it was, it dragged in the puddles he crossed, leaving a narrow trail.

"Er," said Ino, letting Deidara herd her forward and into the big dark doorway of their base. "Pleased to meet you..."

She did not feel particularly pleased to meet this abrupt and intimidating man, but he was obviously important to Deidara. Even if it didn’t seem like Sasori was the kind to be won over... Well, Ino was friendly and enjoyed being liked naturally, of course, but she was also very aware that she'd eschewed the protection of her village and her safety was more or less in the hands of the ninja here.

Ino wanted Deidara to like her, and that meant being friendly to his important people. Obviously.

Sasori cut a glance over his huge hunched shoulder at her. His eyes weren’t right, she thought, with a weird shift in her belly. They were sort of... glassy, not like people’s eyes were glassy, but like they might be _made of actual glass._

She swallowed.

He made an annoyed noise and turned back away.

Deidara poked her in the shoulder to get her attention and then when she looked back at him he raised his eyebrows and mouthed, ‘See? Grumpy,’ to her.

Ino gave him a smile, but it felt like she was forcing her face into some strange unfamiliar shape. From the way his eyebrows drew together, looking faintly concerned, she figured she’d done pretty poorly.

The corridor was dark. 

Maybe this was a mistake.

Well. 

Too late now. 


	4. Chapter 4

Ino and Deidara followed the grumpy Sasori into the building.  
  
Suna was a close ally of Konoha, and some missing-nin were especially famous. It would take a lot of nerve for another missing-nin to take the name 'Sasori'... So Ino was forced to consider that when he introduced his friend 'Sasori', Deidara actually meant that this was _Sasori of the Red Sand_.  
  
Her stomach felt cold and unsettled. Ino did not pretend that it was because of the flight.  
  
“Remember, we leave at dawn tomorrow,” Sasori said in his deep and gravelly voice, and then he disappeared pretty fast. Had he just been waiting, then, to meet Deidara at the door and tell him this? Ino watched the tip of his -- tail or something -- follow him down the corridor. It scraped gently on the stones.  
  
It was dark in here. Dark, and cold. The lights were in wire frames on the walls, bright and cool. They attracted insects and she could see the flickering shadows cast by fluttering wings on the featureless walls inside.  
  
It wasn’t a welcoming environment. And the whole building was apparently just full of murderous missing-nin.  
  
Ino shivered. It was only partially from how cold and wet she was.  
  
“Come on, I’ll show you where the bedrooms are, and then the bathroom where you can clean up,” Deidara said. He swept his sodden ponytail over his shoulder, but he didn’t seem to feel the chill from their flight through the storm.  
  
Deidara gave her the run down as he went through the layout on the way to ‘her’ room, pointing out common areas as he went. They did not immediately encounter anybody else, for which Ino was thankful. She wasn’t sure she was ready to meet any of the people who owned the chakra signatures she could sense flickering here and there. Ino wasn’t much of a sensor, but she didn’t have to be. They were all huge and potent.  
  
“So this is you,” he said once he’d steered her into the first corridor on the left.  
  
Ino eyed the door. She was apprehensive, and it drowned out almost all of her other feelings. Carefully, she reached out and opened the door.  
  
The room on the other side had a bed against one wall, a secondhand desk with a pitted top, a chair and a chest of drawers. Everything was plain. There was a big window that looked out onto the overcast sky and a constant, drumming rain.  
  
“It’s just the basics -- you can do what you want with it, although Kakuzu,” he rolled his eyes, “wants me to make sure you know that if you break the furniture you’re not getting any more unless you buy it yourself.”  
  
“Break the furniture,” Ino repeated.  
  
Deidara shrugged, and, in an evident effort to be reassuring, he said: “Well. Don’t worry too much, yeah. If it happens, it happens.”  
  
This was reassuring in entirely the wrong way, and did not explain in the slightest what they thought Ino might do to break a desk or a bed.  
  
Ino unslung her bag from her shoulder, ready to drop it off and continue on learning about the building -- and hopefully the people who lived here, before she had to actually encounter them -- from Dediara.  
  
“It used to be Orochimaru’s,” Deidara went on cheerfully and obliviously, peering over her shoulder into the room. “We fixed it up for you, though.”  
  
Ino stilled with her bag dangling from her fingers, frozen halfway across the threshold.  
  
“Kisame hosed it down, yeah. Look,” he gestured, and Ino followed the motion to see the marks of a heavy duty water jutsu carved into the wall on one side of the room, presumably by accident when it had been directed away from the window, “although I checked it for traps.”  
  
It... _looked_ like a normal room.  
  
“It was Orochimaru’s?” Ino asked, still unwilling to take a single step further.  
  
Most missing-nin were troublesome because they undercut legitimate ninja business and were potential information leaks -- they had, by and large, left their villages because they didn’t want to be there anymore, or were likely to be convicted if they stayed, and were not therefore directly threatening to the inhabitants of those villages.  
  
Ino only heard about the activities of missing-nin very rarely. They were a shadowy and dangerous bogeyman, a thing little ninja grew up being told to be wary of, and a grave danger when encountered on missions, but by and large nobody was actually that worried about them at home.  
  
“Um... yeah. He’s not actually here anymore,” Deidara added, squinting at her. “Have you met him? Yeah? Creepy, right?”  
  
Orochimaru was the single exception to the rule for missing-nin.  
  
He showed up in Konoha once every few years with improbably detailed knowledge of their watch schedule, and then he left -- usually having made a mockery of their village security, taunted several of his previous comrades into a frothing terrified rage and _really upset_ all the members of the Hokage’s janitorial staff.  
  
It was always a very stressful time for T&I.  
  
Ino did not really want to say ‘honestly I saw him from a distance this one time and that was enough,’ because -- well, firstly, it seemed pretty cowardly, and secondly, apparently he’d once been Deidara’s housemate, through some strange circumstance. But, honestly, Ino had seen him from a distance, once. And it had been enough.  
  
Ino had been eight. He'd sicked up a giant snake, which had sicked up a new Orochimaru holding a sword, who had then sicked up another snake. There had been a lot of wet noises, and the ninja close enough to smell it were all dead.  
  
Inoichi had confirmed, tiredly, that this was pretty much how talking to Orochimaru went every time. Especially with the vomiting snakes thing. Vomiting things was, apparently, Orochimaru's signature move.  
  
She hesitated. “Is it...”  
  
Deidara waited with mounting impatience. “What,” he said flatly, finally.  
  
“Are you," she started and then paused. Hesitated. And then blurted: "You're sure it’s safe?”  
  
“As sure as I can be,” Deidara shrugged, crossing his arms. The sleeves of his cloak, still wet, squelched.  
  
Ino eyed Deidara. He was clearly a pretty dangerous ninja himself, given how Shikaku had reacted to him, but that didn’t necessarily mean he was qualified enough to take care of anything one of the legendary sannin had left behind.  
  
He watched her expression for a second as she hesitated at the door, and his eyes were calculating and searching in his pretty face. “Look,” he said finally, leaning back against the door frame. “We don’t have anywhere else to put you. You can’t room with me, because I’m with Danna and he’s -- grumpy, sometimes. Occasionally.”  
  
He said ‘occasionally’ as though it was code for ‘constantly’, and Ino thought about Sasori’s gravelly voice and glassy stare and tried not to shudder. She didn’t entirely succeed. Hopefully, Deidara would interpret it as a shiver from the cold.  
  
“You could ask Kisame, but he rooms with Uchiha Itachi and,” his mouth twisted when he made a face, “I won’t ask them for you, yeah.”  
  
Stay alone in a room that had once housed Orochimaru in all of his terrible, unholy brilliance, or become roommate to a couple of strange mi...  
  
“Uchiha,” she repeated slowly, “Itachi?”  
  
“Oh, you know _him_ ,” Deidara muttered.  
  
“He’s here?” Ino turned her head to stare at him. He had an expression on his face that Ino recognised distantly as exactly the same one she made when Sakura out did her in a written test at the academy. “Uchiha Itachi is _here?_ ”  
  
As with most ninja, Ino had the vague idea that Uchiha Itachi, Sasuke’s older brother, was some kind of ravening psychopath who could safely be ignored because he was a missing-nin -- he’d _left_ , and was therefore _not in her village_.  
  
But apparently he lived here.  
  
“You changed colour,” Deidara said curiously. “Do you need to sit down?”  
  
_Yes,_ thought Ino blankly. She let Deidara propel her into the room with no more resistance. She flinched when he kicked the door to BANG closed behind them.  
  
He tugged her bag from her numb fingers and let it thump onto the floor next to her foot, and then steered her to the bed with his fingertips on her shoulders. The bed was way higher than the average futon and a much better height for dropping bonelessly upon.  
  
She sat.  
  
Oh. The realisation came upon her, again, that she was tapped in a single enclosed room with a missing-nin. An Iwa missing-nin, even.  
  
This feeling, she understood with a sudden and unhappy lurch somewhere in her belly, was going to be her constant companion for the foreseeable future.  
  
“Uh,” said Deidara, eyeing her like he had no idea what to do with her and thought she might be primed to spew poison on contact, “Do you know where you are?”  
  
She frowned.  
  
His expression went tight and unhappy -- eyebrows knitted together, mouth thinned down into a flat line. He shifted on his feet. “Uh, so, it’s -- December thirteenth, and --”  
  
Oh. “No, I -- we’re in Rain. Or River. I think. I don’t know where I am because you didn’t want to tell me. Not because... ”  
  
Because... What, did he think she was having some kind of _episode_? Was that common among missing-nin?  
  
“Oh,” said Deidara.  
  
He looked at her. It wasn’t quite in the eye -- more like his eyes were set on her cheekbone and he was faking eye contact while actually avoiding it at all costs.  
  
She looked back. His eyes, unlike hers, had obvious dark pupils. Otherwise the resemblance was uncanny.  
  
There was a supremely awkward silence.  
  
“Right, yeah.” Deidara shifted back onto his heels, rocking his body away from hers where it had bent closer and closer over the course of that exchange. “Okay. Well! Uchiha’s an ass but he’s not gonna, like, beak in and murder you in the middle of the night. I mean. Probably, yeah. Uchiha is really the least of...” He stopped.  
  
Ino had already, internally filled in the rest of his comment and her entire nervous system gave a tiny, upsetting lurch. _The least of my what?_ she thought, pulse racing, but she knew.  
  
“He wouldn’t start with you if he did, anyway,” Deidara said.  
  
Right, she thought, absorbing yet another alarmingly specific reassurance from Deidara. She didn’t like them in general, but in this case it was actually comforting. It was, after all, a matter of public record that Uchiha Itachi had killed is clan to challenge himself. Ino knew that she could not possibly pose a challenge to an S-ranked ninja.  
  
“He’d try to kill you first,” Ino said aloud. Hearing it made her feel a little better.  
  
“...Right!” Deidara agreed. He tucked his facial expression away behind his eyes before she focused on him again, but she was very, very good at reading bodies and faces both. To her eyes he did not seem entirely pleased by her comment, despite his smile.  
  
Deidara was trying pretty hard, she thought, to be friendly and accommodating for her, even though it was increasingly obvious that he had no idea what he was doing and had not considered the ramifications of bringing his orphaned half-sibling home to live with him at all.  
  
She had a hunch that ‘friendly and accommodating’ did not come very naturally to Deidara.  
  
“Sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean...”  
  
Deidara’s eyes narrowed. Then he made an annoyed noise. “It’s fine. It just figures that out of everyone, it’s _him_ you’ve heard of.”  
  
She swallowed. Her throat seemed parched. “I’ve heard of Orochimaru, too.”  
  
“That’s like having heard of the Seven Swordsmen, yeah,” Deidara scoffed. He rolled his eyes.  
  
“Are you just annoyed,” Ino began, and then went on with a burst of reckless confidence, “Are you only annoyed that I hadn’t heard of _you_?”  
  
He twitched. He _was_. She bit her lip against a tiny, watery smile at the pure absurdity of it. He wasn’t really so much older than her, she guessed.  
  
“An artist likes to be appreciated in his field,” he said stiffly. “But I guess you know him because he’s from your village, yeah.”  
  
Ino gave him a short, calculating glance from under her eyelashes, and made the conscious, diplomatic choice not to tell him that she’d heard of Sasori. “Probably,” she agreed, glancing toward the door.  
  
“Right. Yeah, of course... yeah,” Deidara straightened and twitched his long, damp tail of hair over his shoulder. “So, okay, this is your room, it’s fine, right? And there’s a bathroom two doors down that way,” he pointed vaguely.  
  
Ino nodded. Bathroom, right. Once again she caught a flash of something embedded in his hand. She looked, but all she got was the distant impression of a smile. Which was... weird. Maybe she’d see better later. It would be rude to ask, right?  
  
“I’ll show you the kitchen later. You should know where other people’s rooms are, too, if... well, you should know, yeah.” He didn’t offer her a hand up.  
  
“Alright,” he said, opening the door again and waving her through. He pointed across the corridor. “Me and Sasori. If you knock and nobody answers, don’t try to go in.”  
  
Sasori was pretty famous for poisons, so that made sense. “Okay,” she said, wondering if she really wanted to be right across from that room.  
  
“And, if I’m not here for whatever reason, don’t bother Danna. I mean. I’m sure he wouldn’t hurt you or anything--”  
  
He did not, in fact, sound sure, and Ino certainly wasn’t.  
  
“--but he has a pretty short fuse. So, if I’m not here, don’t bother him.”  
  
Ino could not think of a single situation that might drive her to bother Sasori of the Red Sand. She didn’t even want to look at his his hunched and alien figure. It was an easy rule to agree to. “Okay.”  
  
“Great!” he sounded relieved. “So if I’m not here and you need help with something,” he began. He stopped. Paused. Hesitated in the corridor. Glanced at her.  
  
After a long silence, he finally advised her: “Probably you should try not to need help with anything.”  
  
That was perhaps the least comforting thing he’d told her so far.  
  
“If you really need help though,” he sighed, “Kisame is your best bet.”  
  
Hadn’t he said that was the person who roomed with Uchiha Itachi? Ino felt herself twitch, but if Deidara even noticed, he ignored it.  
  
“He’s in that one,” he pointed to a door. “And that is the end of doors you should knock on. Mine. Kisame’s. The bathroom. No other doors.”  
  
There were several other doors in this hallway alone. Did their rooms all contain _yet more_ missing-nin?  
  
“This one belongs to Konan. The next one is Leader’s -- his name’s Pein --” because that wasn’t an ominous name or anything, “and at the end is Hidan and Kakuzu. Just...” he paused. “Ahh, just pretend _none_ of those doors exist, yeah.”  
  
Ino did not recognise a single one of those names, and now she wondered how hard it would be to get a copy of a bingo book -- any bingo book, she wasn’t that fussy about its country of origin -- out here.  
  
“Got it?” Deidara prompted, turning to her impatiently.  
  
“Got it,” Ino agreed, before he could run out of good will. “You, Kisame-san, the bathroom,” she pointed at each. She elected, as much as Deidara had, to ignore all mention of Uchiha Itachi. Deidara seemed relatively certain he wasn’t going to slaughter them all and flee into the night -- not, Ino thought, a certainty that seemed to be held up by experience, but all right -- but he also didn’t seem to want to even contemplate him.  
  
Given that Deidara was cheerfully -- voluntarily, even -- hanging out with Sasori, who he playfully called ‘grumpy’ instead of ‘very upsetting to even look at’, that said ...kind of a lot.  
  
“Cool, cool,” Deidara said with a relieved sigh. “Anyway, Zetsu has the basement and Tobi sleeps in, uhh, a hammock in the store cupboard or something, yeah, so don’t worry about them. Let’s go introduce you to Kisame!”  
  
“Wait,” said Ino, who had gotten caught up on the phrase ‘hammock in the store cupboard’, even as her brain was counting out missing-nin quietly in the background and coming up with _ten_ of them in this one, increasingly fragile-seeming building, “What?”  
  
“Oh, well -- I know you probably want to clean up, but it’ll be good to introduce you to some people quickly,” Deidara explained. It was not the thing that she wanted explained, but it was indeed an explanation. “It’d be bad if they thought you were an intruder, yeah.”  
  
“I... right,” said Ino, and wondered if perhaps she hadn’t made... rather a large mistake.  
  
Deidara smiled sideways at her, fixed and a bit manic.  
  
Konoha’s orphanages could not have been that bad.  
  
Surely.  
  
Once again, Ino was reminded that it was too late to rethink her choices now. With her clothes still clinging wetly to her and her damp hair tangled against her neck, she once again followed her half-brother down the dark and echoing corridor.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt credit, where it's due: [Morgrim](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morgrim/pseuds/Morgrim) suggested that Ino needed to meet Konan and maybe talk about flowers. (Sorry, they suggested this in like 2016. We all know how quickly I respond to prompts. >_>) [Neloska](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neloska/pseuds/Neloska) was the person to suggest that we should hear about "the scene where she discovers Deidara's mouths next". (2018, phew.) 
> 
> If either of you notice this post, and prefer not to be credited here, let me know and I shall remove it. Otherwise I will err on the side of credit.

  
  
Deidara took Ino through the maze of corridors and shadows that made up this strange building. Ino completely failed to memorise its layout. She was good at people, not logistics. She got lost around the fifth turn.  
  
“Do I have to know the way back?” she asked as they climbed the second set of steps. All the corridors and rooms seemed identical. It was probably intentional.  
  
“No,” Deidara assured her. “It took me a week, yeah. I’ll show you back later --” and he waved one hand vaguely.  
  
Once again, Ino caught a strange glimpse of something buried in his palm. She tilted her head. Were those teeth? She was pretty sure those were teeth. She couldn’t tell if they were a weapon he was wearing, or something that was actually part of his hand -- and she couldn’t get more than a glimpse at a time either.  
  
She was almost tempted to ask -- if didn’t want to tell her, he could just say so -- but then they exited the stairwell via a blank door of heavy stone and came out upon a landing. It was a small room, open on one side, and almost devoid of furniture except for an old wooden umbrella stand in one corner. The open side was taken up by a huge balcony. Outside, the rain poured down in a wet, heavy sheet, almost unbroken where it spilt from the balcony overhang.  
  
Inside, a man and a woman turned toward them, pausing their quiet conversation at th sound of the door.  
  
Deidara seemed either not to notice, or not to care about, the tension of the room into which they’d just emerged.  
  
Ino noticed.  
  
The body language of the pair was... odd. The woman’s was familiar but by no means relaxed. Her arms were loose at her sides -- nails painted burnt orange, another gleaming ring on her middle finger -- her feet were both planted firmly on the floor, and her golden eyes were heavy lidded and sleepy beneath a coat of colour only a flew shades paler than her sleek blue hair.  
  
She wasn’t pretty. She was a parody of a kunoichi, with her affectations of femininity thrown like a lazy cloak over what was so clearly a combat ninja that even a civilian could have picked her out of a crowd. It wasn’t exactly a look. But she was... constructed, carefully, like the paper rose in her hair.  
  
No, Ino realised after half a second -- it wasn’t a rose. It was a camellia, formal double style. Roses could be about romance or sacrifice or youth or beauty or hope or -- a lot of things. But a camellia like that meant one thing: _divinity_.  
  
Ino looked away, unsettled by the woman’s heavy stare -- which didn’t help much, because the only other thing in the room that she _could_ look at was the last person, and if the lady had been unsettling...  
  
There was something wrong with the man. It was made worse because Ino could not have said exactly what that wrong thing was. His body language was stiff and strangely immobile, as though he'd forgotten he was made of flesh and muscle and not just stone. He was tall, red-haired, with a symmetrical and reasonably handsome, heavily pierced, face. His eyes were a strange, pale lilac with long circular stripes instead of obvious irises, yes, but Ino came from Konoha, which was the undisputed land of weird doujutsu. It wasn’t his _eyes_ that were wrong. It was...  
  
She frowned. She couldn't pick it. She felt unease uncoil in her belly, spreading in knots of uncertainty. Her nerves seemed primed for -- something.  
  
“So this is her?” he said, low and with an easy authority -- he had assumed himself to be in charge, and nobody was going to refute him. Ino didn’t really know, but that seemed like a precarious position when you lived in a seething nest of missing-nin.  
  
Ino went politely along with the introduction Deidara made -- Konan, with the paper flower, and Pein, with the eyes -- but it wasn’t until Pein came to stand before her that she could pinpoint what was so very, very wrong with him.  
  
“Your hitae-ate,” he said, holding out his hand. She watched him speak, and -- perhaps he was a clone, or an illusion, but _this_ was the sort of detail that people’s unconscious minds filled in automatically when they interpreted genjutsu. Nobody could have done _this_ with an illusion by accident. Was he doing it on purpose, then? Was it by design, just to make people uncomfortable?  
  
Ino untied her forehead protector without protest. Her hand brushed his when she handed it over to him, and his skin felt cool to her touch. There was a ring on his thumb, with a purple stone. It said ‘zero’, which meant basically nothing to Ino. Internally, her mind was racing.  
  
She wasn’t sure what kind of expression was on her face when she looked at Pein, but she could feel the attention on her, thick in the room. In her peripheral vision, Konan’s golden eyes seemed suddenly to sharpen, and Ino heard her hum softly. Beside her, Deidara had adopted a superficial pose of casual nonchalance that would have been convincing had she not been close enough to feel the buzz of his unhappy chakra.

Ino's heart thumped, out of time with the pounding of the rain.  
  
Pein, of all of them, was the one who seemed immune to the atmosphere. Ino pasted on a nervous expression and fixed her eyes on her forehead protector and _not_ upon the incongruities of Pein’s body -- which were beginning to pile up now in the lockbox of her mind, behind her wide eyes and furrowed brow.  
  
She bit her lip, which might have been hamming it up a little, but the wince she made when Pein scraped the tip of his kunai over the leaf in the middle of her forehead protector wasn’t faked. The tip made a harsh _skreeeee_ against the soundtrack of the rain outside.  
  
“Do not forget,” Pein said, handing the protector back to her.  
  
“I... won’t,” she agreed, even though ‘do not forget’ was opaque, as instructions went. Ino took the protector by the strap. She was very, very careful not to touch his hand again, which -- she thought they all noticed that, too. She had no idea if this was a bad thing or not, and she didn’t know where to look in the ominous quiet left in the wake of Pein’s voice.  
  
‘Do not forget’. Like she could _possibly_.  
  
Ino’s eyes landed, again, on Konan. She wasn’t sure precisely what possessed her, only that any diversion of attention seemed ideal at that moment. Usually Ino loved being the centre of attention, but she was getting a short, fast crash course into how very different certain kinds of attention could feel. This kind, she did not like.  
  
“I like your camellia, Konan-san,” she blurted, even though she didn’t, really. The flower was a well-made piece of art, and very pretty, but it was a garish ornament for use as a kanzashi. Still, Konan gave her a long, slow blink and raised one hand toward the paper flower, never quite touching it.  
  
Pein turned, partway, to glance toward her.  
  
And Deidara seized the opportunity to also seize Ino, hooking her by the damp back of her collar.  
  
He retreated at speed. “Alright, that’s Ino-chan, and that’s Leader and Konan-san, yeah! Great, we’ll get her settled, good talk --”  
  
The door slammed behind them.  
  
“I thought it was a rose,” Ino heard Pein say, muffled by the door but just clear enough to interpret, into the echoing silence after the slam. Konan’s voice was less distinct.  
  
Ino clutched her forehead protector. She needed no encouragement to hurry away down the stairs.  
  
“Ne,” she said, once they were a floor away, “is Pein-san... is he always like that?”  
  
“Always like what?” Deidara said, as though he wasn’t just now slowing down himself. Their ‘retreat’ felt a lot more like, uh, ‘fleeing’.  
  
There were so many ways Ino could have answered that question, because there were so many strange incongruities about Pein’s body: his hollow voice, his stiff and unyielding body language, his enormous but unsettlingly empty chakra, his cold, smooth-preserved skin. But when she clarified, she went with the most obvious and least explicable one:  
  
“He wasn’t breathing.”  
  
Deidara was silent for a few steps. Distantly, Ino could hear the rain pounding along against the walls.  
  
“Yeah,” Deidara said eventually, flatly. “Yeah. He’s always like that.”  
  
“Oh,” said Ino.

They were silent for several more steps.

“So is that a bloodline limit, or...”  
  
“I don’t know,” said Deidara. “If it is, it’s nothing like mine, or anyone else’s I’ve seen, or --”  
  
“You have a bloodline limit?” Ino interrupted. It was an exceptionally rude question, generally speaking, but he was also her half-brother. They were _related_. If he had a bloodline limit --  
  
Deidara stopped walking. “Wait, you don’t?”  
  
Ino looked at him. “No?”  
  
A thread of unease unfurled in her belly, rising above all the unease that was simmering there from the long and difficult day she was already having. If Deidara had taken her in on the assumption that they shared a bloodline, and therefore a hereditary skill, she might be in a lot of trouble.  
  
Could Ino fake a bloodline limit? She tried to imagine pretending to have something like the Byakugan. That would certainly be... an undertaking. Was that what those things she’d glimpsed in Deidara’s hands were?  
  
Deidara opened his mouth, and then clamped it shut, and then tugged her arm and hustled her down the remaining stairs and through six winding turns until they ended up right back in her new room. He booted the door closed behind them.  
  
"Is that what's in your hands?" Ino asked once the door was closed. She guessed even in the middle of the living space, bloodline limits weren't spoken of so openly -- not your own one, anyway.  
  
"What?" Deidara blinked, and then barked out a short, sharp laugh. "No," he said then, before she could even clarify, holding out his hands and flexing them.  
  
Ino peered at his palms, where there were identical, perfectly articulated mouths embedded. In unison they stuck out their tongues and Ino twitched back as Deidara laughed.  
  
"This is Iwagakure's vaunted kinjutsu, yeah," he said, wriggling his fingers and clicking their teeth. "They'd never have given it to me on purpose."  
  
Gingerly, Ino reached out one hand. She moved slowly, so Deidara had all the time in the world to withdraw his hands if he didn't want her to touch them.  
  
She touched a lip.  
  
It... felt like a lip. She pushed a little harder. There were teeth behind it, hard under the plush softness of it.  
  
"That's..." She'd almost forgotten about Pein now, at least. Mouths in his hands. She looked back at his mouth -- the one in his face. They looked pretty much the same.  
  
"Yeah, it took some getting used to," Deidara agreed.  
  
Ino nodded. "Can they talk?"  
  
"Nah. Can't swallow or digest, either. That's not what they're for." He withdrew his hands and tucked his hair away from his single visible eye. Beneath the long pale fall of his bangs on the other side of his face, there was some kind of scope or something. Ino thought about the huge clay bird flying high above. He probably did a lot of ranged work.  
  
Ino didn't ask what on earth they were good for. If they were a forbidden technique of a Hidden Village, they were undoubtedly good for something other than biting.  
  
"So if that's not your bloodline limit," she said then, leadingly.  
  
"Explosion release," Deidara said, slouching back on his hips to frown down at her. "I can't believe you don't have it. Your father did..."  
  
For a second Ino thought about Inoichi, and then she realised that Deidara was talking about their shared biological father -- not the one she'd loved, who'd accepted the child of his wife with open arms. Ino had always known she wasn't his, not by blood, but... He'd made it so easy to forget.  
  
A swell of grief blindsided her for a moment. It stole her breath and made her feel briefly, overwhelmingly, guilty. How had she been able to think of anything else? Her father was dead. Her heart was broken.  
  
She blew out a breath. In through the nose, out through the mouth.  
  
"No, I've never --" she paused, swallowed, ignored Deidara's increasingly confused expression. "Sorry, how does it work? I wasn't tested for it, but I don't think..."  
  
Deidara shook his head. "Have you had your chakra type tested?"  
  
"I'm a fire type." So had her mother been -- half of Konoha had fire nature chakra. It was the most common kind in the village.  
  
"Ohh," said Deidara, in a half-admiring tone. " _Nice_. You'd get lightning and earth in various different combinations if you had the explosion release... here, hang on, I'll show you-- let's see..."  
  
Ino stood by, stupidly, for the second that Deidara needed to pull something out of the pocket of his long dark cloak. It was still damp from the rain outside, and he wrinkled his nose but came up with a low value coin, which he put on the sturdy wooden desk.  
  
Then he beamed at her, stuck one finger out and touched, gently, the flat of the coin.  
  
Something sparked at the tip of his finger, right where it touched the coin, and then Ino felt the tiny, delicate flare of his chakra.  
  
“Wait,” said Ino, going wire-tense with the sudden realisation of what was about to happen.  
  
Then there was a _whumf_ , and then the sound of rent air, rapidly displaced: _**boom**_.  
  
Ino yelped and dived past Deidara, past the end of the bed, jamming herself against the wall next to the door. The sudden burst of energy threw out a bright light, streaming their shadows against the walls like huge, monstrous things. The sound rang in her ears like thunder. The force of it -- heat and pressure, and a streaming wave of chips of wood -- was all thrown against their bodies.  
  
Deidara made a sound she could hear, faintly, above the big boom -- a delighted, thrilled little whoop of excitement.  
  
“Did you _see_ that? Isn’t it _beautiful_?”  
  
There were hands on Ino’s arms, hauling her up, and Deidara spun her around the room. There was some smoke, the smell of hot metal and burnt wood catching in the air -- and in her hair and clothes, no doubt -- and splinters and chips of wood over everything.  
  
Ino flailed. “Deidara-san!”  
  
He ignored her yelling, caught her motions toward escape easily, and redirected her until she had to either spin with him or fall over. She spun.  
  
He ended behind her, hands on her head, pointing her toward the scene of his small-scale destruction. The floor was scorched. The wall was scorched. There was no evidence of a desk.  
  
“ _That_ ’s the explosion release,” he said into her ear, in a soft and thrilled voice. His thumb moved delicately against her ear, catching on the skin.  
  
Ino swallowed. Her breath was coming hard and her heart was racing.  
  
And then: Her training kicked right back in, and she breathed out through her mouth again. Like grief, panic would pass. She was not being attacked. She’d had other ninja show her techniques in stupid, thoughtless ways. She’d been that ninja to others sometimes.  
  
...admittedly, it was something people usually _grew out of._  
  
Deidara, behind her, vibrated with excitement.  
  
In a way, once she wasn’t being danced wildly around the room while Deidara had a fit of excitement, the damage was interesting -- it was like an explosive note, but more... condensed. The flash and the boom were similar, but an explosive note would have left bits of the desk. The legs, at least, she felt confident, would have survived.  
  
They had not survived Deidara’s bloodline limit.  
  
“It’s... very impressive,” she said, raising one arm and pushing her hair away from where it had stuck between her neck and her collar. Deidara let go of her before she could send it flying into his face.  
  
“Isn’t it,” he breathed. “It was the first kind of art work I fell in love with,” he confided.  
  
If it could do that to wood and metal, with as small a point of contact as a _coin_...  
  
“I can’t imagine,” Ino said slowly, “what that would do to a ninja.”  
  
Except that was a lie. She could absolutely imagine what that would do to a ninja. She was very aware, suddenly, of the sensory ghost of Deidara’s hands on her skull. She shivered, and felt immeasurably glad that he’d let go before she’d thought about it.  
  
He made a soft, wanting noise in his throat. “Yeah,” he agreed, in a very different tone to the one Ino had used to make the statement.  
  
This, then, she thought, was that mean, hungry thing that had been hiding away behind Deidara’s friendly veneer. She’d seen tiny glimpses of it -- hell, she’d _expected_ it -- she’d already known he’d seemed, outwardly, too well-adjusted for an Iwa-nin, and certainly for one who had fled his village.  
  
She wanted to ask him what about this struck him as beautiful. Impressive, yes, it was definitely that. Powerful, certainly. Compelling, perhaps. But _beautiful_?  
  
He’d called himself an artist.  
  
Between demolition and art, there was a lot of overlap -- he’d said that to the case worker, back in the capital.  
  
Ino blinked slowly.  
  
“Yes,” she said, numb and definitely lying, “it’s very beautiful.” She felt him relax behind her, felt the dull purr of his happy chakra, and knew she’d made the right call even if she didn’t understand it at all. Sometimes, it was better to just agree with people to get along.  
  
“But... didn’t you say we weren’t allowed to break the furniture?” she went on, reaching for something that felt halfway normal.  
  
Deidara paused. “What?”  
  
“Earlier,” Ino prompted. “You said--”  
  
“Oh. Oh, yeah.”  
  
There was silence for a moment.  
  
“Shit,” said Deidara.  
  
Ino twitched.  
  
There was a loooong pause. Something went click. It might have been a precariously balanced wooden chip falling to the floor.  
  
“Why don’t you,” he said, inching away from the scene of the exploded desk, having already come right down from his high, “just... settle in here for a while. We won’t tell Kakuzu about this... and I’ll get you a new desk, yeah. Yeah?”  
  
Ino wasn’t even sure who Kakuzu was. Once again, she wished she had a bingo book. She’d have to be able to get her hands on one somewhere.  
  
“O...kay,” she said.  
  
Deidara staged another expeditious retreat, this time without her, and Ino was left in the settling silence of a room covered in wood dust and splinters, with only her bag and the slightly worse-for-wear bed for company.  
  
She reminded herself that this was her life now.  
  
Outside it continued to rain. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The only note I have to add to this is: You can always tell it’s my writing because it has too many em dashes in it.
> 
> Edit: wait! That's a lie! I also wanted to say that I'm pretty sure Ino is not, according to whatever data book, a fire type. Creative license. ^-^


	6. Chapter 6

This had obviously been Deidara’s attempt at doing something to make Ino feel – well, normal. From the second she’d walked into their hideout on the industrialised outskirts of Ame, nothing had been normal. The sounds and smells were different and the people here - the ones she’d been allowed to meet, at least - were variously crazy or terrifying. After the loss of her desk earlier, Ino had categorised Deidara himself in categories one _and_ two, so there was... some overlap.

Deidara wasn’t as good a cook as Ino was. He wasn’t even as good a cook as Sakura was, which was a little bit tragic. That much was obvious. But it also wasn’t the point. He hadn’t pulled her from where she was ‘settling in’ (sitting in horrified shock on a new bed in a room that was now hers) and marched her down to the kitchen because he wanted to wow her with his culinary skills.

Food was a good choice, objectively. Everybody ate. It was a point of familiarity. And eating with somebody was an exercise in trust. It was obviously more about trying to make Ino feel okay than it was about the food being good.

The sun was still out, but Ame was a grey place and the light that filtered in through the skylight was dim. It was still plenty of light to see when dinner was being mutilated, though.

“Maybe I should do that?” Ino said weakly, watching Deidara grossly overcook a side of fish. She hopped down from her seat on the sturdy wooden table to peer over his shoulder.

He made a dismayed noise but swiftly surrendered his spatula to her. The teeth in his palm clicked on its handle. The fish …wasn’t really salvageable. She put it aside, pleased that he’d at least had the foresight to get more. Initially it had seemed like a really inappropriate amount of fish but now she realised that half of it was likely to be inedible.

There was a long pause. Ino threw some salt in. At least some salt would help. Deidara-san didn’t seem to remember seasonings were a thing, which was common in shinobi who took a lot of field missions.

There was a long, uncertain silence. Deidara-san hovered.

“Um. The vegetables need to go on now,” she prompted, uncertain if this was how they were meant to be doing it.

“…right!” Deidara-san said, and cheerfully switched gears to follow her instructions. “That looks good. You must really know your cooking, yeah.”

‘That’ was only partially cooked and she hadn’t done anything much to it, so the compliment was either completely insincere or at least very optimistic. He was probably trying to make her feel more relaxed, but all it did was make her tense. She wondered what else he was lying about.

“Do I cook all of it?” she asked levelly instead of answering.

“If there are leftovers we can eat them later, yeah.”

Looking at the enormous pile of fish she had to wonder how much Deidara was planning to eat.

Ino was silent for a second.

“Right,” she agreed.

He smiled at her.

She smiled back.

They both… smiled.

Ino was actually feeling pretty miserable, but by god he was trying. She could respect that.

Even if he wasn’t a very good cook himself, Deidara followed instructions pretty well when he felt like it, and they succeeded in making a perfectly edible if not exactly gourmet dinner.

“Amazing,” Deidara-san said with what seemed worryingly like genuine awe. He served the rice, fish and vegetables up onto a plate and handed it to her directly. “Ta-da,” he declared.

At least he was cheerful. Ino heaved a relieved sigh and accepted her plate. It was looking like maybe they could get through dinner without –

“Food!” Yelped a voice, and then a whirlwind of dark hair and long limbs and something very orange swooped past.

“ITTADA-gck!”

Deidara clotheslined it with the arm that was still clutching a serving spoon.

“ _Don’t you dare,_ ” he hissed in a voice that was suddenly way, way less cheerful.

He wrapped his arm around the newcomer’s neck and pulled him closer, into a headlock and now very near the filleting knife in his other hand.

Ino felt her whole body lock up just in time for her brain to remind her that she was stuck in a fortress full of missing-nin again.

Deidara shot her a look that was halfway apologetic. “I won’t be a minute, Ino-chan,” he said in the same deliberately-friendly voice he’d been using for most of the day.

“Senpaaaai,” whined the new missing-nin. She hadn’t met this one when she’d arrived. The orange thing was a mask. She couldn’t see any of his face and it only had one eye hole.

Deidara put his spoon down - but not the filleting knife, she noticed - and twisted just enough to grab the masked man’s hair and ran his skull into the corner of the table. The mask only protected the front of it.

Ino clutched her plate.

“Yamanaka-san, excuse me,” murmured Uchiha Itachi from right behind her.

Ino let out a shriek fit to wake the dead and leapt away.

There was a long pause.

“Slow reflexes,” grunted a hulking man by the door, one with glowering bloodshot eyes and ugly scars.

“She’s a genin, Kakuzu-san,” Itachi said mildly, sidling past her to help himself to their dinner. He passed a plate back to Kakuzu, too. “It’s to be expected.”

“I like genin. They’re easy to catch,” said yet another missing-nin. This one had a symbol on his forehead protector that Ino didn’t recognise. He was white as snow, from his skin to his hair. His eyes were a dark pinkish colour, but he navigated like he had no trouble seeing. Dangly jewellery around his throat, hair just long enough to grab, half-open clothing hanging from his shoulder – either he didn’t fight at close range, or he was very confident. And he was built like a close range fighter.

Instead of helping himself, he took two steps into the room and casually tugged the plate from Ino’s hands.

She gave it up without a fight.

“Thanks, kid,” he laughed. It was bright, but the killing intent was already in his chakra. She could feel it on her skin. He reached forward. She flinched. All he did was smile wider and tug lightly on her hair. It didn’t even hurt.

“Hidan,” said Itachi repressively. Ino could almost feel him staring at the albino one right over her shoulder.

She looked sideways, but Deidara had become embroiled in a shrieking argument with the masked man.

She swallowed.

Slowly, Hidan released her hair. Okay. That was good. Okay.

Ino replaced herself with a chair halfway across the room, conspicuously putting Deidara between her and the rest of them.

“What–” he looked up, looked around, glanced between Itachi and Hidan and made a noise like a teakettle boiling over.

“You can’t just come in here and _steal her food_ ,” he snarled, booting the masked man in the ribs one more time – he barely reacted, and then, after a second, made a grand show of fake agony. Deidara left him and stomped toward Hidan. “Give that back!”

“Or what?” Hidan asked, baring his teeth. “She’s not gonna stop me.”

Itachi sighed softly and wove around them to leave.

“Or I’ll stuff you with C4 while you sleep, yeah,” said Deidara. “I’m gonna turn you into _mist_ ,” he hissed.

That was… graphic. Ino swallowed. Even if he did succeed in getting her plate back, Ino wasn’t sure she’d be eating. Her stomach didn’t feel good.

“There, there,” sighed the masked man, getting up – completely uninjured, apparently – and patting her gently on the arm.

“Um?”

“Tobi will get you a new plate if Tobi can have some,” he bargained happily.

Ino looked at the stove, and then at the two bristling missing-nin in front of it and the dark stare of the one leaning in the doorway. Itachi was long gone now, and Ino had never thought he’d be one of the least scary people in a room, but she kind of wanted him back. She’d swap him for Hidan, that was for sure. That man seemed to not even notice that he was leaking killing intent.

“…sure,” she said, because queasy or not, she had to eat sometime.

“Yosh!”

With exaggerated sneaking motions, Tobi made it to the stove and back. Although he was dramatic and silly, Ino did notice that his presence - the sense of his chakra - dropped to almost nothing while he was ‘sneaking’.

He returned just as Hidan finally took a swing at Deidara.

Ino flinched again.

Tobi hooked one arm around her shoulder and shoved a plate into her hands. “Don’t be scared, Ino-chan,” he said cheerfully. He shoved a piece of fish through… the eye hole… of his mask… Ino twitched. “Think of it as dinner and a show!”


End file.
